Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Not only a painter but also a poet, Dante Gabriel Rosetti was born in London, where his father, an exiled Italian painter and Dante scholar, served as
Professor of Italian at King's College. The family was steeped in literature and art. All three of the Rosetti siblings would have important effects on
late-nineteenth-century English culture: Christina Rosetti became a well-regarded poet, and William Michael Rosetti became an influential critic. Dante
Gabriel Rosetti spent the earliest part of his career torn between painting and writing, but entered the prestigious Saas Drawing Academy in 1841 and was
established as a professional painter by the late 1840's. (He continued to write poetry and make transplantations from Italian.) He was a leader in the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an English art and culture movement which he founded with the critic Leigh Hunt and the painters Holman Hunt and Sir John
Everett Millais. Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics were not perfectly unified: Hunt and Millais preferred to create a naturalistic world in which dramatic events
may take place among men and women; Rosetti often drew on classical, Biblical, and literary subjects. Rosetti's Girlhood of the Virgin Mary, exhibited in
1849-and signed by the Brotherhood's collaborative initials "P.R.B."-received much enthusiastic attention. Yet Rosetti soon withdrew from the world of
public exhibitions, preferring to accept commissions and sell works to private clients. After 1851 he worked mainly in watercolors and chalk, drawing
themes and subjects from Shakespeare, Dante, and the Arthurian legends. His work was championed by the critic John Ruskin, in part for its very naïveté;
Rosetti's income from commissions and sales was impressive. In the late 1850's the younger artists William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones worked with
Rosetti in painting Arthurian frescoes for the Oxford Union Building Debating Hall, thus forming a second wave of Pre-Raphaelites. Rosetti became a partner
in Morris's decorating firm and thus had a impact on revolutionary new ideas in design. In the 1850's and early 1860's he used Elizabeth Siddall, whom he
married in 1860, as a model for many paintings; after Siddall's death in 1862, Rosetti continued to paint many pictures of beautiful women, who are often
presented as dangerously seductive and melancholy. Rosetti also helped pioneer the use of Japanese images and styles in modern painting.